Here's a problem I think about a lot: most people want to make ethical choices. They want to buy from companies that treat workers fairly, use services that aren't quietly selling their data, and support businesses that aren't destroying something in the process. The problem isn't the wanting. The problem is that actually doing it is exhausting.

You'd need hours of research for every purchase, a law degree to decode most privacy policies, and frankly more free time than most people have after work, kids, and the general chaos of being alive. So instead, most people make a compromise ‐ they save their time, save money, or just accept that they can't always know. That's not a moral failure ‐ that's reality. Who can blame them?

That's the gap I'm trying to build into. My goal with scizu is to offer services that are genuinely useful and naturally ethical ‐ where doing right by customers is just the business model, not a marketing angle. The first three I chose (personal organizer, job search tools, personal budgeting) all share the same quality: they help people have a better life without any fine print working against them.

Will I get this perfectly right? Not a chance. I'm going to make plenty of mistakes along the way, and I'll probably cringe at some early decisions in a few years. But I'm committed to improving constantly and taking feedback seriously. Which, conveniently, brings me to the site I started last year.

Why I built thevotetoday.org

Fair elections is one of those issues where I kept seeing people frustrated online ‐ across the political spectrum ‐ and I couldn't find a good, low-cost solution that actually addressed the core concern. So I did what any reasonable person does when they can't find a solution: I spent months building one myself, definitely a normal and proportionate response 😜

The idea is straightforward: voters enter their ballot choices on thevotetoday.org and can also upload their ballot or receipt. Those results get aggregated and compared against official tallies. It's a citizen-led verification layer ‐ transparent, non-partisan, and simple enough that it doesn't require any special technical knowledge to participate. The concern about election integrity isn't owned by any one side of the aisle, and the site isn't either.

It's a starting point. Right now it aggregates reports and voter registration complaints, but there's a lot more it could do. That's where you come in.

As always, feedback is the thing that actually makes these sites better. If you have thoughts on scizu, thevotetoday, or just think I'm solving the wrong problem entirely, the support request feature on either site goes directly to me. I read everything.

Hey there. I'm just a guy who's been building small websites as a hobby for a while now. It started the way a lot of things do - just messing around and trying to figure out how stuff worked. Some of my earliest "sites" were just IP addresses with no domain name, which tells you how seriously I was taking the whole thing. It was more of a learning exercise than actual websites.

The first real one I remember putting together was back in college, a site with a collection of recipes for cocktails and a running list of parties I was hosting or planning to attend. Exactly the kind of thing a college guy would build, and honestly the first useful site I ever made. My friends used it, it was fun, and I was hooked on the idea of building something small that served a group of people that I cared about.

I've run a few other small sites since then, and this is the first time people asked about putting up a blog.

The first question people ask is: What's with the name? A few have even told me it sounds like some kind of shady company selling overseas products online. That's not my style, I grew up on the West Coast - enjoying the sand and surf while waiting for my acoustic modem to download something.

The truth is less interesting. I wanted something short — genuinely short, not "short for a 14-syllable brand name" short — and that is surprisingly hard to find with domain names in 2023. Everything is taken. I also didn't want something that looked like a cat walked across the keyboard, like qlqwf.com. I wanted it to be pronounceable and easy to remember after hearing it once. And ideally, it shouldn't accidentally mean something embarrassing in another language (look up the Chevy Nova).

Scizu checks all of those boxes. It's short, it's not gibberish, you can say it out loud without feeling ridiculous, and it appears to mean absolutely nothing in any language. Done. No focus groups, no brand consultants, no pivot strategy.

That last part kind of sums up the whole philosophy here. I'm not interested in marketing or building a brand. I'm not going to pepper the pages with ads or nudge you toward spending money on things. The goal is the same as it's always been — a small site with a small community, doing the specific things we actually want it to do, without all the marketing machinery that most of the internet has bolted onto everything.

If that sounds appealing to you, stick around. There's more to come.